Week 5 Day 4: Seek and Ye Shall Find

Major Activities of the Day: We started today with a task to put together a binary search tree.  Since I've done this stuff before, the major leap of logic (that a depth-first search using a recursive method is necessary) was pretty trivial, and I spent most of my effort making the methods really pretty.  I used a Struct to make things a bit cleaner, since there weren't so many methods in total, though many would say the class is still too big to rely on a Struct.  You can judge for yourself:

	BST = Struct.new(:data, :left, :right) do
	def insert(new_data)
	new_data > self.data ? input(:right, new_data) : input(:left, new_data)
	end
	def input(side, new_data)
	self[side] ? self[side].insert(new_data) : self[side] = BST.new(new_data)
	end
	def each(&block)
	self.left.each(&block) if self.left
	yield self.data
	self.right.each(&block) if self.right
	end
	end

view raw binary_search_tree.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I thought a Struct was warranted to avoid having to use self.send; this way, I could do self[side] using the built-in Struct [] method.

We spent a lot of time going over forms and associations in Sinatra, and working on some assignments dealing with complex associations.  In short, we put together a web app with virtual houses that give out candy to trick-or-treaters, i.e. users who have input a name and age.  Each user has a bucket that holds all the candy, and you can view all houses, or a particular house, view your bucket, and eat your candy - which may get you sick if you eat too much!

In the evening, we had a meetup; my favorite project was by Arielle Sullivan and Chris Guthrie, who put together a web app that finds the worst (in terms of health department violations) restaurants in any zip code in New York City.  Apparently, the Subway a lot of people go to during lunch is pretty awful.  Oops.

Skills developed: Binary search trees, forms and complex associations in Sinatra